Dear Jon, Howard, lists, As far as I can make out, there are important relation between Hertz' basic ideas and Peirce's.
To Peirce, the relation of similarity connecting a diagram to its real-world object is not necessarily easy to grasp - on the contrary, in many cases it requires protracted work of both empirical and theoretical stripe. In Peirce's doctrine of how reasoning with diagrams is undertaken, however, the central idea is that the manipulation possibiliites of the diagram correspond (to some degree) to the real transformation possibilities of the object depicted by the diagram. So this is an operational definition of diagrammatic iconicity which I think is non-trivial because it removes similarity far away from the simpler examples of immediately recognizing perceptual aspects of one object in another. So, I think this relation between manipulation possibilities in the diagram and real relations in the object (Peirce) corresponds to Hertz' idea of the "narrow strip" connecting the consequences in the model with the consequences in reality. That said, there's a large difference in rhetoric between the two which may be superficial but still may lead us astray. Hertz' dramatic language of the cold and alien world of actual existence on the one hand and mere "associations of the mind" on the other paints a sort of existentialist picture of man as an isolated loner in the universe, a bit like Jacques Monod a century later. Nothing of the kind is found in Peirce's general description of knowledge which assumes a far more intimate relation between man and reality. Maybe this difference in style is connected to Hertz' seeming idea that the universe consists of little more than actual existence while Peirce, of course, takes reality to encompass also, in addition to actual existence, all sorts of laws, patterns, tendencies not reducible to such existence (but here, my knowledge of Hertz may be insufficient). In any case, despite these differences, I think there's an important core shared by the two: the procedural, operational possibilities of a good model mirrors those ot the object modeled - that is a relation which is most often not direct and often hard to establish. Best F Den 20/09/2014 kl. 16.43 skrev Jon Awbrey <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> : Thread: HP:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/14168<http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/14168> JA:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/14169<http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/14169> HP:http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/14177<http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.science.philosophy.peirce/14177> Howard, I was responding to your assertion that Peirce agreed with Hertz's epistemology. The snippets you cite all echo one version or another of the so-called "correspondence theory of truth", also known as the "mirror of nature theory of science" because it assumes a purely dyadic form of correspondence: analogies, diagrams, morphisms, etc. The correspondence theory is naturally everyone's first theory of truth, but not all reflectors on the mirror theory stop with that as their next best guess. It was roundly criticized by some of the Ancients, by Kant, and even though he took it as a useful first stepping stone, by Peirce. As reflected in the images and metaphors you invoke, the correspondence theory of truth leads to a very Cartesian view of things, a very Saussurean take on the use of signs, and it issues in all the false problems of "symbol grounding" that so bedevil some corners and cul-de-sacs of the cognitive cottage industries. That "alien world" is no alien void, it is a plenum that we live our lives in and play our parts in. The whole modifies the part that we are and the part that we are modifies the whole. Many of those modifications, inside our skins and out, amount to models and theories that we use to understand a part of what is going on. The business of signs and inquiry is not mirrorly a reflection of the whole but a form of participation in the world that leads to understanding. Regards, Jon HP:Peirce, as a chemist (1887) also agreed with Hertz's epistemology (1884): "The result that the chemist observes is brought about by nature [Hertz: “the image of the consequents of nature”]; the result that the mathematician observes is brought about by the associations of the mind. [Hertz: “consequents of images in the mind”] ... the power that connects the conditions of the mathematicians diagram with the relations he observes in it is just as occult and mysterious to us as the power of Nature that brings about the results of the chemical experiment." [W:6, 37, Letter to Noble on the Nature of Reasoning, May 28, 1987. (1897)] HP: Hertz: "As a matter of fact, we do not know, nor have we any means of knowing, whether our conception of things are in conformity with them in any other than this one fundamental respect [Peirce's "power that connects"]. JA: Peirce, unlike Hertz, did not stop at a correspondence theory of truth. And that has made all the difference. HP: Hertz also did not stop thinking about the correspondence, or what physics now calls the epistemic cut. HP, quoting HH: | Outside consciousness there lies the cold and alien world | of actual things. Between the two stretches the narrow | borderland of the senses. No communication between the | two worlds is possible except across this narrow strip. | For a proper understanding of ourselves and the world | it is of the utmost importance that this borderland | be explored. | | [Keynote address,Imperial Palace, Berlin, 1891] HP: Peirce has certainly explored this borderland, but I am still not clear what "has made all the difference." Phaneroscopy is on only one side of the border and doesn't get us across the narrow strip.
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